How do you handle project management with Jira Plans?

[Gille_ Melanie]

Hi,

we are currently using Jira Plans to manage multiple projects. Within these projects, several teams are involved, each contributing their part. As the number of parallel initiatives has increased, it has become more and more challenging to maintain a clear and realistic planning overview.

At the moment, we structure our projects using Initiatives as the overarching topics, with Epics, Tasks, and Subtasks representing phases and workloads. While this setup works well for organizing work on a detailed level, it falls short when it comes to understanding the overall capacity and availability of the involved teams.

In particular, we are facing difficulties in visualizing how heavily individual teams are already allocated across multiple parallel projects. Some teams are becoming increasingly overloaded, and this is not sufficiently visible in our current setup. Additionally, factors such as vacations, business trips, workshops, or other absences are not transparently reflected in our planning, which further reduces planning reliability.

What we are looking for is a way to better understand and visualize:

• the actual participation of each team across multiple projects
• their overall workload and capacity
• and their real availability, including planned absences

Therefore, I would be very interested to understand how your project management process addresses these challenges. In particular:

• How do you handle cross-team capacity planning?
• How do you incorporate availability (e.g. vacations, workshops) into your planning?
• And how do you ensure transparency across multiple parallel projects?

Best regards

[Mary from Planyway]

Hi @Gille_ Melanie 

Thank you for the detailed explanation — this is a very common challenge when Jira Plans are used for high-level initiative planning, but the team capacity picture has to be managed separately.

Based on what you described, I would recommend looking at Planyway for Jira as an additional planning layer on top of your existing Jira structure.

Planyway can help you keep your current hierarchy — Spaces, Epics, Tasks, and Subtasks — while giving you a clearer view of workload and availability across multiple parallel projects.

For your use case, the most relevant part would be the Workload / Resource Planning view. It allows you to:

• connect multiple Jira projects into one planning view;
• see who is assigned to what and when across projects;
• calculate workload based on Jira estimates or remaining time;
• spot overloaded or underallocated people before it becomes a delivery issue;
• plan capacity on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or longer-term scale.

Regarding cross-team capacity planning, Planyway works especially well when work is planned at the assignee level. You can then use this to understand the total load of people who belong to the same team and see where capacity conflicts appear across initiatives and projects.

For availability, Planyway also lets you configure working hours and mark unavailable time such as vacations, sick leave, holidays, or other days off. These unavailable days are excluded from available capacity, so the workload calculation becomes more realistic. Workshops, business trips, or internal events can also be reflected as unavailable or planned time, depending on how you want to treat them in your process.

For transparency across multiple parallel projects, Planyway provides a shared timeline and workload view where project plans, assignments, deadlines, and capacity conflicts are visible in one place. This makes it easier for project managers and stakeholders to understand not only what is planned, but whether the plan is realistic based on actual team availability.

Best regards,
Mary

[John Funk]

Hi Melanie - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

If your project plan is that large and complex, you are better off using one of the many Capacity Planning third part apps in the Atlassian Marketplace. 

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?query=Capacity+Planning&hosting=cloud

They coming with a variety of functionality and costs (including some Free ones!).